I create domestic worlds that are both familiar and mysterious. By focusing on pockets of the home, I hope to conjure worlds of memory and history. The things we surround ourselves with in our intimate spaces are there because of a mixture of choice, tradition, and circumstance; they are an essential part of our sense of place. I hope to convey the way ordinary objects, laden with the past but confronting us in the present, can become expansive upon reflection.

Our houses are the cores of our worlds, providing us with our earliest sense of self and of belonging. My paintings draw from fragments of rooms from my apartment, the Cleveland houses where I spent my childhood, and my family’s home in Krk, Croatia. The painting-space allows for a free interplay of multiple places and times, just as our mental space allows past memories and present conditions to both mingle and conflict in the rooms we spend our lives in, the ones that become a part of our internal schema for who we are.

Danielle Mužina is a painter and writer from Cleveland, Ohio. She recently received her M.A. in Studio Art at Eastern Illinois University, and an M.F.A. in Painting at Miami University. She is Assistant Professor of Painting at Murray State University in Murray, KY.
Mužina was born in the United States, but maintains strong connections with her family in Croatia. She has studied painting abroad at the Jerusalem Studio School in Civita Castellana, Italy, and was a part of Ohio Wesleyan’s New York Arts Program. Mužina has also received several grants and awards for her thesis work in painting and her research in poetry.